


Afterlife

by miraielle



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: F/F, F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-19
Updated: 2010-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-13 19:29:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/140867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miraielle/pseuds/miraielle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alpha evolved once; he will again.</p><p>And so, for that matter, will Echo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Afterlife

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aaronlisa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aaronlisa/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Aaronlisa!
> 
> And also many many thanks to Steve and Elissa and Vivien for their wonderful betaing assistance.

“See you in five years, Mr. Kraft,” DeWitt says. His chair tilts backwards. A brief, searing pain shoots through his skull.

He is on a floor.

It is wrong. There is no chair, no DeWitt (and don’t think the two of them aren’t going to have a long chat sometime very soon, oh yes, he would have done anything to not spend the next two decades in prison but somebody needs to wipe that superior smirk off of her fucking face), no guards, no glaring suit.

The floor is concrete and cold.

They lied to him, clearly. He doesn’t know how long it has been; it could’ve been thirty minutes or thirty years, but he is not where he is supposed to be, and he is hungry and - yes, he can tell as he shifts on the floor - much thinner than he should be. Peak physical condition, like hell. His joints scream in protest as he stands up and looks around-

The room. Ah, now, that is interesting.

Oh, yes, this he recognizes.

And there is a chair, after all, on the other side of the room.

Primitive, obviously, but he was just sitting in one, less than a minute ago as the mind flies (though perhaps his body has come the long way round) and it’s not the sort of thing one forgets.

There’s a bed in the corner, thin mattress and sagging springs; shelves and shelves of canned food; some complicated tubing in the corner, hooked up to the sink and toilet, which weren’t there the last time he was here.

There’s a small TV and a DVD player, a note taped to it. ‘Play me’. His handwriting.

It can wait, he thinks, until he’s seen the sky. Until he’s sure that he’s free.

The door, it turns out, is also new. Reinforced steel, hinges on the outside, no knob. Just a keypad and a little blinking red light. He presses a few buttons and the keypad buzzes. Then the red light goes off and it’s a full minute before it starts blinking again. So: one combination a minute, and he doesn’t even know how long the combination is. Even if it’s only four digits, that’s potentially seven days straight, no breaks.

He presses play.

“Welcome back, Karl,” he says from the screen - and it’s him, much older than he was hoping. Same shirt, same room, a cut above his eye dripping blood sluggishly. Karl touches his forehead, and his hand comes away sticky. “My name is Alpha. Hope you like what I’ve done with the place.”

“Oh, no fucking way,” Karl says, looking up at the door. If it’s four digits, he could be out of here in less than two weeks, even with breaks, and it probably isn’t 9999 anyway, so probably a lot less than that-

“You could try codes until the heat death of the universe and you still wouldn’t even be close,” Alpha says. “You and I are going to spend some quality time together.”

***

Having Paul Ballard in her head really wasn’t as good of an idea as it sounds, Echo decides after a couple months. Okay, yeah, the sex is amazing, though she isn’t really sure that it’s not just overly complicated masturbation, but he is one nosy son of a bitch. Plus he’s Paul from ten years ago - the wedge Alpha made back when he was not so much a contributing member of society - so Paul keeps digging through her memories, trying to rebuild himself or something, and saying things like, “Did I really say that? Man, I _am_ corny,” and trying to guess what he’s going to do next. Half the time he’s wrong, which is really disconcerting.

And somehow she’s still lonely, and starting to feel a little crazy, sitting around talking to herself all the time, because it isn’t actually the same as having real live Paul. Priya and Tony and T have taken over one of the pod rooms, turned it into their own little home, and the tech-heads keep skulking around looking pissed, though they haven’t tried anything yet, and Mag and Kilo are spending most of their time together, so really it’s just her, and the Paul Ballard in her head.

It is not going to be the easiest year ever, basically.

***

The next two months crawl. Karl was never very good at being alone, and it doesn’t really get more alone than this - one room, no way out, no company except for one super creepy DVD of the person who took over his body, day after day of cold canned beans and peas and spam - seriously, fucking spam. Sometimes he watches the water filtration system for fun.

He’s not really particularly interested in following Alpha’s instructions, but he’s thought through all the other options, and it turns out there really aren’t any.

So on day 61, as per instructions, he sits down in the chair, and he presses the button.

It hurts a lot more than he remembered, though he supposes he wasn’t really aware of more than the first couple seconds, the last time. And then there’s another person in his skull, making himself comfortable, spreading out into the nooks and crannies of Karl’s head like he’s more comfortable there than Karl is, like a really twisted game of Tetris and all that’s left for Karl are the gaps where the blocks don’t quite line up.

Memories pour over him, none that he sees for long enough to make any sense of them, but there is pain and anger and misery there. And a girl.

“Who’s she?” Karl asks.

“Nobody,” Alpha says.

And then, in a whisper, “Echo,” and Alpha laughs and laughs.

***

She’d kind of forgotten how frustrating Paul Ballard of ten years ago could be. Back then, she suspected he didn’t always approve of her; now she knows. It’s like he doesn’t think she put herself together the right way, too much of one thing, not enough of another, why did she keep any bits of Terry around at all, and seriously, why is she a little jealous of Mag and Kilo, and doesn’t she know the dollhouse was just using her to fulfill these guys’ fantasies, why is there so much of all of the women she was made to be for them, all of these - well, he doesn’t _say_ sluts.

But it’s not like he can hide much from her anymore.

“Is this really what you thought of me the whole time?” she asks him.

He doesn’t answer, and she doesn’t know how to explain that she liked _choosing_ to just want him, even though she still loves Joel and Matt and Frank and Megan, and that she’s pretty sure real Paul had come to terms with that, and god help her, she does not have ten years to sit around waiting for this Paul to deal with it, too.

Now she’s not sure anymore if real Paul ever _did_ figure it out, though if he didn’t, he never made it an issue, and maybe it’s not possible to love somebody who can’t keep secrets from you.

And then she wonders if it’s bad that she’s started differentiating between the Paul inside her head and the Paul who died in front of her.

***

It only lasts ten minutes the first time, and then he passes out and wakes up alone on the floor again, his thoughts rattling around in his suddenly empty skull. He’s supposed to wait another three weeks - Alpha explained, something about wavelengths and refraction periods and the ionosphere, but who the fuck understands that shit anyway - but he goes a month before he sits down in the chair again.

And then, there is Alpha, rifling through his memories.

“Just have to figure out where we left off,” he says. “You know, it’s not like you have an unlimited food supply down here, and you’re not getting out until I say you are. Might not be so smart not to see me when I tell you to.”

“You would die too,” Karl tells him. But Alpha just smiles.

He sticks around a lot longer this time, and it gives Karl time to do some rifling of his own. Alpha’s pretty much holding himself together with string and spit (“Well, it’s a little more complicated than that,” Alpha says, “but more or less, yeah,” and that’s never going to stop being disturbing, the way he’s never alone in his own mind) and it doesn’t always work too well. He’s a little too interested in Karl’s memories of the woman he had here, and sometimes he whispers a suggestion - “For next time,” he says - before Karl finds his thoughts forcibly wrenched elsewhere. There’s some heavy weight on the goody-two-shoes side of the scales, but Karl begins to wonder if he might be able to tip them, if he might be able to take over entirely, to use the brains and the skills that Alpha’s knotted together into a person.

After all, wasn’t it really just Karl the whole time, anyway?

***

She’s hanging out with Tony and T. Despite Priya’s objections, T loves wrestling with his dad more than pretty much anything else these days. Echo suspects Priya would mind a lot less if Tony weren’t teaching him actual military hand-to-hand techniques.

“Our son is not going to be a killer,” Priya says every time T ends up bruised and grinning.

“I’m a killer,” Tony says. “ _You’re_ a killer. We don’t know what the world is going to be like when we get out of here. He should know how to protect himself.”

“I just want him to be happy and safe!”

“We’ve kept him safe, and he _is_ happy. You’ve taught him so much about...you know, life. And beauty.” In Tony’s mouth, they still sound like things he’s not sure really exist, or that he can’t quite believe he deserves to have. “Please, Priya. Let me teach him the things I know, too.”

They have this argument at least once a month, and since they usually don’t emerge from their room for a couple hours afterwards, Echo figures it’s harmless. In a way, it’s comfortingly familiar - different personalities figuring out how to coexist. Integrating. Like she’s not so different after all.

Anyway, on this particular day, she’s helping out, showing T a few moves of her own. They’ve done this before, and sometimes she’s let Paul take over for a couple minutes to show off.

But then, on this day, he doesn’t ask first, just pushes her aside and stretches into her limbs.

“Oh, _fuck_ no,” she screams, and shoves, taking her body back and nearly falling over from the force of her mental push. “I’m sorry, T. We’re gonna have to do this another time.”

The fight after that one is long and loud.

“I’m sorry,” Paul says. “I just assumed, since you’d let me before, that it would be okay. I was excited! I wanted to show the kid-”

“No,” she says. “ _No_ , Paul. I fought for this body. It is mine. Nobody gets to do anything to it or in it or with it that I don’t say, ever, _ever_ again.”

“Who am I, then?” he asks. “Who am I?”

“You’re just another goddamn voice in my head.”

***

The third time, Alpha stays for a few days.

He starts trying to knot Karl in. Right there, between the sociopathic racecar driver (and what the fuck, whose fantasy is a sociopathic racecar driver?) and the loving family man. Or maybe next to the paranoid pothead scientist.

Just to see where he fits.

Karl learns a lot, actually, more than he thinks Alpha means him to. The racecar driver’s car number was thirty-seven. The family man had two kids, ages eight and six. The scientist just says, “Four twenty,” and giggles.

Karl figures if you have to remember a massively long security code, having your multiple personalities pick the numbers is as good a way as any.

From the outside, Alpha looks pretty well put together. On the inside, it’s all pushing and pulling and hate and something up top holding everything together.

“Paul fucking Ballard,” some of Alpha snarls to him. “Until he showed up, I was continuing your work. I was making art.”

Karl didn’t realize he’d been making art. He thought he just liked causing pain.

***

The headaches come back.

That’s what finally makes Echo admit that the situation is unsustainable. Not the other stuff - the way she doesn’t really trust him, or the way he judges her, or the fact that it turns out that half of his baggage is that he’s kind of an asshole, or that he’s just not the Paul she loved. He’s still the Paul with the emotional attachment to her that has to do with a creepy Prince Charming, save-the-prostitute complex. Her Paul fell in love with her, _Echo_ , not Echo-who-should-be-Caroline-who-is-really-just-a-girl-he-made-up-in-his-head-anyway.

And whatever she is, she’s not Caroline.

It’s possible that, without that one day where he crossed the line - where he walked all over the line and then acted like it never should’ve been there in the first place - she would’ve fought harder to find a solution to the headaches, would’ve looked through Dr. Saunders’ - Whiskey’s - notes, would’ve ventured into Topher’s office (where none of them go, not since they disassembled the chair) to see if she could find some other answer.

But still, it’s the headaches that finally do it.

***

The deeper Karl goes into Alpha, the weirder things get. It’s all crazy Alice in Wonderland shit, people melting together and pulling apart like taffy and they all look like him (except for the tall guy with the square jaw who keeps an eye on him from a distance, always watching) and he keeps getting sucked in, stuck, bits of him pulling off and sinking into the morass.

He’s lonely when Alpha leaves now, too, which he doesn’t like at all.

“Alone at last,” he says every time.

And then he watches his piss drip through the plastic tubing.

“What the fuck do you want from me?” he asks Alpha. It’s the sixth time he’s loaded Alpha into his brain, or maybe the seventh, he’s starting to lose track, and every time Alpha sorts through his memories, figuring out where they left off. Karl tried to withhold memories a couple times, just to see if he could, but Alpha always found them, and that’s another thing Karl doesn’t get, why Alpha has unlimited access to his mind but he never has any idea what’s going on. (“I have a lot of practice,” is all Alpha says when he asks).

“I killed you once,” Alpha says, which isn’t really an answer but is still plenty interesting. “You deserted me.”

Which, seeing as Alpha wouldn’t even exist if he hadn’t, is pretty twisted, which Karl kind of likes.

“Why bring me back, then? Why not just let me be dead?”

“People change,” Alpha says. “Anyway, I didn’t particularly have a choice, as it turns out.”

That’s the closest Karl has come yet to figuring out what the fuck is going on.

He’s getting more bits and pieces about Echo, too. She pops up for a second every time he reloads Alpha, and once he knows where to look, she’s everywhere.

Alpha loves her and wants her and fears her and Karl understands all of that. What he doesn’t get is why Alpha doesn’t also hate her, and why it’s totally okay with Alpha - or, okay, most of Alpha - or, okay, the part of Alpha that’s usually in charge - that she loves Paul Ballard and not him, and then it gets even weirder because Paul Ballard is here, too, being totally okay with the fact that she loves some other Paul Ballard, and then there’s the whole thing where they _gave_ her some other form of Paul Ballard to be with, instead of them. Because, seriously, what the fuck is the motivation behind any of that shit.

“She gets to make her own choices,” Alpha says. “If I made her something else, she wouldn’t be herself anymore.”

Karl always thought that was sort of the point.

“Besides,” Alpha continues, “I tried that once, and it was a dismal failure, all around.”

Karl’s getting the idea that Echo is like him - no, like Alpha, not like him, he is Karl William Kraft and he is only himself (and why is that getting harder to remember?) - and she is special and maybe everybody else needs to realize that, too.

“You know, this was interesting the first time around, but I’m finding it a little dull the second time,” Alpha says, and Karl adds that to the list of things he doesn’t fucking understand.

***

When the headaches start, Paul spends a lot of time reminding her to drink more water and asking about the flu and whether maybe Esther is making her eyesight worse before he finally admits what he must’ve known from the beginning.

“Me,” he says. “It’s me.”

“Two whole personalities,” Echo says. “Not enough space in the ol’ brainpan.”

“So what do we do?”

She lets him think about that one for a while, too.

“No,” he says finally. “You couldn’t. Why would you do that?”

“Because I’m Echo,” she says. “Because I tried being a bunch of people once already, and it didn’t work then, either. Because I can’t be both you and me. Because when I realized I was tired of being lonely, I didn’t realize that I still needed to be able to be alone.”

“Is this about that thing with T? Because I apologized for that.”

“And because you don’t get why that was a big deal. Let’s face it, baby. It’s just not working out.”

“Yeah, the last time I heard that, my girlfriend wasn’t planning to end my autonomous existence.”

“Hey, at least you know I’m not lying when I say that you’ll always be a part of me.”

“Can I have time to say goodbye to everyone, or are you kicking me out now?”

“I’m not firing you, Paul. Just...reorganizing a little.”

“It still feels like I’m dying.”

“I’m sorry, Paul. But you died six months ago.”

***

“I have to leave now,” Alpha says. “Last band of radiation passing through. Bring me back in three days.”

“Alone at last,” Karl says.

He is on a floor.

It is wrong. There is no Alpha, no company at all in his head. It is empty and cold and he feels like a visitor in his own brain, rattling around in a too-large house.

He has almost the whole code, now. Some of the personalities whispered them to him, only too eager to escape Alpha’s control; some he wheedled out by flattery; some by threats. Alpha must have known he was doing it, has been working at it for months, but he never stopped him. He has everything except Alpha’s numbers, and those aren’t hard to guess. Fifty-two. Fifty imprints, plus Alpha. Plus Karl.

Paul doesn’t have numbers. He keeps everything in order, and it isn’t very difficult to suss out his opinions on the different personalities, to figure out how he ranks them and where their parts of the code would fall.

Karl types in the number. The door buzzes, and the little red light goes off.

And then, after a minute, it comes back on.

He tries again, in case he mistyped, but he didn’t. The door buzzes, the little red light goes off. Comes back on.

So he watches the piss filter, and eats the last can of beans, and contemplates starting in on the rest of the spam, and waits.

***

Once the decision is made, Echo discovers that she’s not really sure how to start. It wasn’t like it was ever a conscious process; somehow it all just worked itself out, all of the people inside her head stitching themselves together into a whole. Now that Paul is sitting there, silent and resigned and waiting, she doesn’t have the first idea what she’s supposed to do.

“How about you let me take care of it?” Caroline asks.

And of course, of course it was Caroline, the part of Caroline she’d imprinted herself with; or maybe the Caroline who Adele gave her, without memories but with all of her stubbornness and idealism and cleverness intact; or maybe the Caroline who’d been there the whole time, waking her up. Maybe all of them.

“Caroline?” Paul says, and it kind of breaks Echo’s heart, the way he goes to meet her, like he’s been looking for her his whole life and can’t quite believe he’s found her which, Echo guesses, is pretty much true.

“Hey, Paul,” Caroline says. “You are one fucked up guy, you know that?”

“Yeah,” Paul says. “I guess I do.”

“Well, we’re all kind of fucked up here. So don’t worry about it.”

Caroline takes Paul in her arms, and she rubs his back soothingly, and then there is just Echo. Echo version 3.0, or maybe 4.0. She’s kind of lost track now.

But she’s not lonely anymore.

***

“Why didn’t the code work?”

Alpha just smiles, which is infuriating.

“I’m not sure I even wanted to leave,” Karl admits. “What the fuck have you done to me?”

Apparently Alpha isn’t answering questions anymore.

So Karl goes back down the rabbit hole, and he discovers that there’s very little of just him left. He’s all spread out, melted into the spaces between the fifty different hims, and the Tetris-gaps he was jammed into aren’t actually the spaces Alpha happened to leave for him. They’re the spaces Alpha can’t fill without him.

And suddenly he can see the entirety of Alpha’s mind, his memories and his thoughts and his dreams, and Echo shining, and Paul the beating conscience, saying over and over that yes, I, we, may think these things, but we don’t have to act on them, and we don’t have to share them, and there is always another way, and we can always be better.

And the spit and the twine were always Karl, and he isn’t a visitor at all: this whole time, he was the house.

“Ah,” he says.

And then there is just Alpha.

He’s been waiting for a chance to be lonely for years.

***

They don’t really talk about it. One morning, they all just get up and get ready to leave. It’s been over a year, longer than Topher even said they should wait, and if it isn’t safe now, well, it’s never going to be.

Echo doesn’t lead them out, this time; she’s no Moses anymore, and none of them are dolls. They exit through Topher’s lab (and maybe that’s why they’ve all left it alone all this time), up the elevator to the garage, and walk through the vans, still waiting for their cargo.

Echo is the last one up the ramp. She watches them go ahead of her: Tony and Priya with T between them; the tech-heads, Kilo and Romeo and the rest, in a nervous knot, still not sure of who they’re going to be; Mag making her way up the slope slowly, leaning on her cane, a grin breaking across her face when she sees that Zone is camped out at the top, come to look her up in a year or so after all.

“Don’t look so happy,” he calls. “I wanted to go help dismantle the Tokyo house, but no, Adele said I had to wait for you lazy freaks to come out. Bullshit!”

Echo smiles and, all alone, walks into the day.

***

The code is 1.

Just 1. Nothing else. Something Karl never would have figured out by himself (though Alpha can tell that it amuses him now.)

He knows it’s safe, but he waits a few days anyway, because he suspects it’s still madness outside, even with Adele in charge, and he really wants some peace, just for a little while. He wants to be himself.

But finally, one morning, Alpha presses 1, and waits, and the light turns green, and the door swings open, and he blinks against the sunlight.


End file.
